ln less than a week, we’ll be in Addis Ababa, meeting this little boy, this small Dagim.  I can’t even describe how terrified I am.  I deal with rapists and drug dealers and crystal meth makers every day, and none of them scare me like this twenty-two pound boy. 

 

One thing S. and I are both scared of is rejection.  We’ve stored up all this love for this boy, but he’s a toddler now –he will recognize that everything he knows and likes is being taken from him –but he can’t understand language, so we can’t tell him all the things we want to tell him. 

 

I’ve certainly been lonely in my life.  And maybe a lot of only children are a little sensitive to rejection from their peers.  Who knows what shyness is or where it goes?  I’m not shy in the classroom (teaching), but in my personal life, I’ve been accused of a silent and daydreaming detachment. 

 

I know that even if Dagim IS wary of us –he would be a little fool if here weren’t scared of two strangers—I know that over time, we will be everything a family is.  I know how Shasta is when she’s in love with somebody.  That little boy doesn’t stand a chance. 

 

I once heard a recording of Louis Armstrong talking on the stage. 

 

He told the story of being a little boy in Louisiana, and how his mother once sent him down to the river to fetch some water.  He said he got down there, saw an alligator, dropped his bucket and ran home. 

 

His mother stopped him on the porch and he said, “Mama, there’s a gator down there!  He’s big and mean!”

 

And his mother said, “Son, you go down there and get us some water.  Don’t you know that gator’s as scared of you as you are of it?”

 

Louis Armstrong laughed:  “I told her, ‘Mama, if he’s as scared of me as I am of him, that water ain’t fit to drink!”

 

Today is Monday.  Next Monday, we meet Dagim.  I am Louis Armstrong!